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Google Penguin 4.0 is Finally Here

September 23, 2016

It’s finally here.

After 23 months of waiting, Google just confirmed that the Penguin 4.0 algorithm is rolling out to all languages.

Per Google:

Penguin is now real-time. Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at the same time. Once a webmaster considerably improved their site and its presence on the internet, many of Google’s algorithms would take that into consideration very fast, but others, like Penguin, needed to be refreshed. With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page. It also means we’re not going to comment on future refreshes.

Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.

Now that the wait is finally over, sites who have worked hard on cleaning up their link profile may see a stronger road to recovery and sites who build “unnatural” links might see even swifter penalties. Any interesting thoughts on your end? Let us know in the comments!